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Friday, 19 October 2012

Wayland's Smithy: a tangle of tales...

by Penny Dolan

All that was needed, so people said, was a
single coin placed on a stone beside your tethered horse. Have faith,
leave the horse there all night and when you came back next morning,
your steed would be newly shod and the coin gone.

Though the nights of magical shoeing are
surely long past, the ancient burial mound known as Wayland’s Smithy is
still there on the shoulder of chalk downland, and the place with its
tangled tale, haunts me.

I first saw the Smithy on a day so wet that
froglets skittered from the path into overfull ditches and milky water
ran down the cracks in the chalky clay.

The rain gods had only paused. By the time
we had reached the crest of the ridge, a downpour had began. Thunder
rolled around the hills and as we approached Wayland’s Smithy, the huge,
dark clouds above were lit with streaks of lightning.

The long barrow lies off the track. We
pushed through wet bushes and came to it, covered in grass and
surrounded by grove of trees. Several ancient stones formed the gateway.

With the storm raging, the moment felt as
if the past was only a shadow away. It was impossible not to think of
the many feet that had passed along the Ridgeway and made the path, with
or without horses to be shod. Did they all wonder at the mysterious
mound or the strange white horse* spread across the hillside nearby? Did
they seek shelter in the small wood?

However, the helpful smith of the legend does not match entirely happily with the Norse version of Wayland the Smith.

Wayland, or Volund, had been apprenticed to
the dwarves of the Icelandic Mountains, He was one of the three sons of
Wade, the king of the Finns. Out hunting, the brothers found three
beautiful swan maidens, seized their feathered robes, and made them
their wives. When the three sisters discovered their hidden feathers
again, they flew away to freedom.

The two older brothers went searching for
their wives, but the desolate Wayland stayed working at his smithy, sure
that his beloved wife would return for the golden ring he was keeping
for her and all the other treasures he was creating.

Soon rich men grew greedy for Wayland’s
skills, King Niduth of Sweden more than any. Wayland was lured to his
castle, crippled, imprisoned on an island and made to forge endless
objects for the king. So dazzling were the treasures and so great the
family’s pride that they forgot to be wary of their prisoner.

The two princes visited Wayland, who
treated them kindly until they mocked him. Enraged, he beheaded them
both and fashioned a set of dreadful gifts for the royal parents. The
princely skulls became golden goblets, the eyes glittering gems from
their eyes, and their pearly white teeth made a necklace for the queen
their mother.

Meanwhile, the princess, jealous of her
brothers, visited Wayland, bringing a golden ring for him to mend.
Recognising the stolen ring as that made for his lost wife, he cruelly
seduced the princess, leaving her with child. Having sent her and the
horrific treasures back to the palace, Wayland strapped on a pair of
mechanical wings, rose into the sky and flew away.

It is not quite clear how this tale links up
to the burial mound, although the ancient site may have been given its
new identity by Anglo Saxon invaders.

Certainly the tale travelled and adapted. One
version claims that Wayland’s wings brought him to the mound, and that
the Norse hero Sigurd brought his horse there to be shod. Some say that
explains the white horse set in the chalk, who leaves the hillside once
every hundred years and gallops across the sky to the smithy to be
shod.

To me, this tale is loaded with contrasting
images – the stolen skins of the swans, the broken wedding ring, the
patient and desolate waiting, the greed of the powerful, the Samson-like
captivity, the image of those awful golden chalices, and thee
Daedulus-like wings – and they all make the tale of Wayland
unforgettable. One cannot love or admire him, yet there is something
enigmatic about his tale and about the unbound rage that creates such
dreadful treasures.

The crippled smith’s name is mentioned in
Beowulf, in the poem Volundarkvitha (part of the poetic Edda) as well as
in Chaucer’s writings, in Kipling’s 'Puck of Pooks Hill', and in
'Kenilworth'. He is said to be a fore-runner of St Clement, patron saint
of blacksmiths and both have feast days in November.

Why does the Wayland
story matter to my writing? When I wrote my novel 'A Boy Called Mouse',
I came to a section where my Mouse needed to have a place where he
could rage and let out all the anger he felt. The pattern of his world
had shifted dreadfully and he needed time in the wilderness to move out
from his terrible grief, and renew his hope for his quest.

The image of that ancient site came into my
head and the long path running alongside, and the wild storm overhead.
So I created a “tramping man”, a character called Wayland. He is not a
man who would put out my young hero’s eyes, but a wise kindly figure who
makes Mouse to walk and walk and keep on walking along the high ridge
of ground while a storm rages around them, almost Lear-like. Wayland.
This agonising march moves Mouse out of his despair and sets him free
for his future. The tales don’t fit easily together but for me,
something matched.

'Weland forges the Sword' - by H R Millar, from 'Puck of Pook's Hill'

* The Uffington White Horse, a bronze age chalk figure cut into the hillside.

My friend Penny Dolan is a Yorkshire lass like me, a storyteller as well as a children’s writer, and we share a
delight in that feistiest of fairytale heroines, the beautiful and
dauntless Lady Mary from ‘Mr Fox’. We’re also both members of ‘The History Girls’,
a blog devoted to the discussion of historical fiction.

Penny is the author of many picture books
and fairytale retellings for younger children, as well as longer books
for junior readers. Notable among these is ‘The Third Elephant’, a lovely tale of a small wooden elephant who longs to see more of the world than his dusty mantelpiece:

When
night came, the small elephant looked at the empty pool of moonlight.
He thought about what the mouse had told him: wish for what you want,
wish for what you dream about. ‘I wish’, he thought, as hard as he
could, ‘I wish I could see the white palace again.’

In the classic tradition of change coming to discarded
toys, the little elephant is thrown from the window and falls into the
hands of a young girl on her way to play the flute in a
concert - and the adventures begin. ‘Charming’ is an adjective which can sometimes be
suspected of carrying the subtext ‘trivial’, but this is a book which is
both truly charming and seriously involved with the fears and
uncertainties of childhood. Her most recent novel, 'A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E’ is ‘a historical fairy tale’, a beautifully written, carefully researched story of a young boy wandering the roads of Victorian England, and is full of allusions to Victorian
fiction, the theatre, and old legends about larger-than-life wanderers on the
old roads of England - including Wayland himself.Penny has an adaptation of 'A Christmas Carol' coming out this autumn for the Collins Big Cat series, and a story appearing in a winter anthology "On a Starry Night", Stripes Publishing, Little Tiger Press.

5 comments:

Great post - I do love the Wayland story. I remember bits of it being used in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books; these are the books that introduced me to A-S mythology. It's a shame that when the book was adapted recently for a film, all the mytholoogical references were neatly excised!

One of these days I will look more into the swan references. I've come across occasional archaeological examples of burials in pits lined with swan feathers, and indeed, random swan-feather-lined pits, use of which we don't understand. My folklore nose is twitching...

Wayland's Smithy is one of my favourite places. I've only seen it on a sunny day, but the atmosphere was powerful and evocative - there was a sort of stillness to it, even though the wind was rippling through the beech leaves. I didn't know about Wayland's story though. Thanks, Penny and Kath.

Loved this, Penny - and thank you, Kath, for hosting it. Wayland gets about - he features in my Sterkarm Handshake. His story is told at the Sterkarm fireside.And Penny, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E is absolutely wonderful. I remember hearing you read the Wayland scene at Charney and it thrilled me to my boots. It was just as good when I read it to myself on Kindle.

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